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The W.H. Brady Series on Defining Conservatism
SHATING A:MERICA-S- VALUESDEBATE
Panel 1: Midge Doctor, Karl Zinsmolster William J. Bennett,
moderator Panel II: Michael Schwartz, Vin Weber I Kate O'Beirne,
moderator Panel III: Dlnesh D'Souza, David Horowitz Elizabeth
Wright, Michael Joyce Stuart Butler, moderator
T he Lehrman Auditorium The Heritage Foundation Washington, D.C.
September 1S, 1992
Shaping America's Values Debate
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr.:' 'Welco me toThe Heritage Foundation. I am
Ed Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation and it is a great
pleasure -to welcome you to the initial program in our W.H. Brady
Lecture Series on Defining Conservatism. This series, made possible
by a grant from the W.H. Brady Foundation of Maggie Valley, North
Carolina, will continue through next April. All of the lectures in
the series will work toward defining conservative ideas on a broad
range of cul- tural public policy issues. They also will explore
conservati ve strategies to move beyond the nar- rowly defined
Washington policy agenda and to recaptu're'o-ur-cultuie iKd Society
from the dominant liberal establishment.
Some of the media have called the 1990s the Values Decade. There
seems to be a real surge in th e discussion of the moral fiber of
the country and the causes of our current social breakdown. We as
conservatives have pointed to the moral dimension of social welfare
problems and other public policy issues for many years. We should
be pleased that this election year has made the values crisis a
part of the political debate. Traditional values-hard work,
personal responsibil- ity, the importance of family, respect for
proper authority, a general need to reinforce right from wrong in
the young-are being r e cognized as crucial to the future strength
of our country. If these are properly communicated and properly
understood, I think there is a tremendous opportu- nity to gain
converts to our side of the cultural battles. I think one of the
crucial conservativ e achievements has been identifying the link
between moral relativism and our social breakdown. We have on our
panel several of America's leading experts, who have done excellent
work in this area. They will be discussing the link of culture to
public poli c y, and of course, to higher edu- cation. Family
values is an area where economic and social conservatives should
find much common ground, since the free market works best in a
society of good citizens; and from the other perspective, economic
freedom adva n ces some values. Our panelists today will discuss
the values that have made America strong, what government should or
should not do to reinforce them, and what we can do to restore
these values to our culture. I will now turn the program over to my
distin g uished colleague, the Honorable William J. Ben- nett.
Secretary Bennett holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the
University of Texas; he also holds a law degree from Harvard. He
has been in Washington now for more than ton years. He was
appointed Ch a irmen of the National Endowment for the Humanities
by President Reagan, where he brought his academic background to
public service. In 1985 he was appointed Secretary of Education,
where he used the post as a bully pulpit to press for sweeping
reform, suc h as parental choice in education. He realized that
malaise in pub- lic education was not the result of too little
money being spent, but rather the problem was the content of what
the public schools were teaching and the lack of choices available
to paren t s. Under President Bush he served as Director of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy, where he emphasized
prevention, personal responsibility, and tougher, penalties for
drug dealers. Bill Bennett, in his federal posts, has shown that so
many of ou r public policy dilemmas are fun- damentally cultural
problems, moral problems, and that the solutions to these problems
require a deeper examination of the human nature. We are very
proud, indeed, that he is the Distinguished Fellow in Cultural
Policy Stu dies here at The Heritage Foundation. He is, as you
laiow, a political commentator for ABC television and radio. He
recently wrote a book, which has been selling quite well, entitled,
The Devaluing of
America: The Fightfor Our Culture and Our Children. So, ladies
and gentlemen, without any further ado, it is my pleasure to
introduce my good friend, Bill Bennett.
W illiam Bennett: Midge Decter is an author and editor whose essays
and reviews, mostly in the field of social conservatism, over the
past two dec ades have appeared in a number of periodicals,
including Harper's, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Saturday Review. She
has been a regular and fre- quent contributor to Commentary. She
has written three books: The Liberated Woman and Other Americans,
The New C h astity, and Liberal'Parents:Radical-Children. She was
one of the founders of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, of
which she is past National Chairman, and Co-Chairman of the
Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security, a member of
the boa r d of the Committee on the Present Danger, of the Council
on For- eign Relations, the National News Council, and the Ethics
and Public Policy Center. She also serves on the board of The
Heritage Foundation. Midge Decter appears frequently on radio and
tele v ision, and lectures frequently on a wide range of subjects,
from the family to American foreign policy. She is a Distinguished
Fellow at the Institute of Religion and Public Life in New York
City. Karl Zinsmeister specializes in social and demographic iss u
es and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
for Public Policy Research here in Washington. His articles have
appeared in many publications, The Atlantic, Wilson Quarterly,
Reader's Digest, Commentary, and so on. Zinsmeister is a cont r
ibuting editor of Reason, and he authors the Demographic Re- port.
Let me begin my presentation by saying that I hope Ed Feulner is
right, that we win begin to have a serious discussion about
values-what is often referred to as family values, traditional v
alues, or more appropriately, republican virtue-in the campaign in
which we are now en- gaged. I am not convinced we will have that
discussion. So far I don't see much evidence of a serious and
substantive discussion of these matters. I read recently in t h e
Washington Post that advisors to the President have decided to veer
away from these issues because they are tricky and because they are
politically dangerous and because they make some people uneasy and
uncomfortable. All of these things are true. They a re tricky and
they are politically dangerous, and they do make some people
uncomfortable. But they are also of utmost importance, as political
philosophers from Aristotle on have under- stood. There are,
obviously, other issues to be taken up in the cours e of a
campaign, matters of the economy and the budget, health care, and
education-very serious and consequential issues. But, the issues
raised by the phrase "family values" are very consequential and
very important, and I hope the advisors to the Preside n t do not
veer too far from a serious discussion of them. It would be good to
engage in that conversation. To be very specific, I heard the
President's speech to the Christian Coalition a few days ago, and
the whole issue of family values got about two min u tes. I
couldn't understand what the President's speech writer meant when
he wrote, "We cannot go back to Ozzie and Harriet. It might be
wrong to do so." We are all not going back to Ozzie and Harriet,
that is for sure, but is there something wrong with th e notion of
Ozzie and Harriet? This needs to be straightened out. I think that
line in the speech was an attempt to reassure people who had been
un-reassured by ear- lier comments. But, as earlier comments have
perhaps gone too far in one direction, these
2
comments went too far in the other direction. So, we are not clear
on what the view of the cam- paign is. Many Republicans don't talk
about these issues in a serious and substantial way. I don't think
many Democrats will. So we will probably not have a discussion of
these critical issues, and that will be too bad.
One of the charges that is made about these issues is that they are
not as real as the "real" ques- tions facing us, such as the
deficit and the economy. The truth is, they are very real. They are
all too real. Because of the absence of republican virtue t here is
the absence of what we call "val- ues" in the lives of many.people.
We have lots of problems and dai@y catastrophes in American society
precisely because of the absence of these things. What am I talking
about when I talk about these values? Charl e s Krautharnmer wrote
a col- umn last week that will serve as a good introduction. He
said that these values-he also referred to them as republican
virtues-include, but are not limited to: discipline, meaning
self-discipl- ine; a certain measure of civic-m i ndedness-that is,
a concern or regard for others and a recognition that others exist
in the universe, and that some attention is to be paid to them,
their rights, their property and their freedoms; the capacity for
deferral of gratification; and respect f o r legitimate authority.
These are four of the values that I think most Americans believe
are import- ant and have been believed to be important by most of
civilization. It is only in the last 20 or 25 years that supposedly
sophisticated people have raised serious doubts about the
ascendancy of these virtues. Why do I say they are real? Let's be
very straightforward and even simple about it. Because millions of
children in America are not taught civic-mindedness, because they
are not taught de- ferral of gr a tification, because they are not
taught respect for legitimate authority, there is catastrophe every
day. Because of the failure to teach these things to children, we
have tremen- dous problems. Consider the well-publicized carjacking
case in the Washingt o n area where two men grabbed the car and
took off with it, paying no regard to the woman tangled in the seat
belt, perhaps still holding on to the car in order to stay with her
baby. These two men drove a mile or so, and then crashed into walls
and fences , threw the baby out, and so on. One does not need a
social worker to do an in-depth profile to be able to show that
these young men were not raised in families that stress the values
that we just talked about: civic-mindedness, respect for legitimate
auth o rity, de- ferral of gratification, and the like. There is a
serious values deficit in this story, and it has very real
consequences. The mother is dead. This is not the only example. I
came across a lot of examples in the jobs I had in government. I
will n ever forget a story I was told by my Deputy at the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, Reggie Walton, who was a judge of the
Superior Court here in Washington before he came to work for me. He
told me about police officers who went to an apartment and found a
four-year-old child and a one-year-old child who had been left in
there alone for several days. The mother was not there to care for
the children. No father was present, in sight or in memory. It
turned out that the mother was out on the street hu s tling for
crack and had left the one-year-old in the care of the
four-year-old. When the police came upon the children the
four-year-old little boy was manfully trying to do his best to
comfort his one-year-old sister, but he was not doing a very good
job - four-year-olds aren't any good at that. This is, at its core,
a problem of values; it is a problem of responsibility.
3
Lest anybody think I am talking just about the poor or the
underclass, I am not. An illustration of our problem, I think, can
be s een many places and many situations and among all social
classes. I was watching the Oprah show not long ago, and the topic
was about single moms who -date. During the course of the
discussion,-a woman was-talking about how she went out two or three
times a week and stayed out late and got baby-sitters and so on,
and she was scolded by someone in the audience who said, "Well,
isn't that a little too much? After all, your child needs you." And
the woman answered with a very contemporary response, saying, "W e
ll, the child has needs, but I have needs too, and my needs are as
important as my child's needs." Half of the audience applauded this
comment that her needs were as important as her child's needs. The
other half did not-The -half-that did-not -applaud-re p resented
2,000 years of civiliza- tion, which would say simply that when you
have a child the issue of whose needs are more important is
settled-the child's needs are more important. Of course, it wasn't
her "needs" that she was talking about, it was her d esires that
she was talking about. They are very different things. A
parenthetical comment. When I went to the National Endowment for
the Humanities, my first job in Washington, and read the
description of the budget proposal that is to go to Congress, it
was all about the humanities community-the research community, the
teaching community, the television community. All the comments were
about the "needs" of the humanities commu- nity. And a rigorous
examination of the argument disclosed that these- weren' t about
needs, these were about desires. It is an important distinction, I
think. For almost all of the history of our civilization, I think
it has been conceded that when one has children, one looks first to
the needs of children and sacrifices one's own i nterest from time
to time, and quite often for the sake of those children. It is fact
that in our tradition and our history we can find, I think, no
examples of any successful society that decides to raise its
children with- out families and decides to ra i se its children, at
least in the early years-, without attention to the priority of
needs of the child. Just to indicate the general nature of these
problems, I remember visiting a very wealthy subur- ban school
district in the Midwest when I was Secretar y of Education. This
was a school district that was spending around $7,000 per year, per
child to educate kids. It was a fine campus, with every facility
you can imagine, every piece of technology available. I commented
to the princi- pal that this was a g r eat place and I assumed they
had everything money could buy. He said, "Yes, well we do have
everything money can buy. It is a very wealthy community. The
parents are willing to pay the taxes, they are willing to
contribute more money, and we do great." I a sked, "How is the drug
problem?" He said, "It is thriving, too. We have everything money
can buy. 99 So it is clear that this problem of family values, if
you will, is not limited to inner cities. It is a real problem and
a very serious problem that needs to be discussed. Now, having
heard that, people say, "Fine, it is serious, but what does
government have to do with it?" We are going to leave it to our
later panel to talk about exactly what the federal govern- ment can
be doing about these things. But, a part from serious concern about
loss of a sense of responsibility about our children and fraying of
the social fabric, is there really anything here for people who are
interested in public policy? I believe there is a lot here. First
of all, as you can te ll from my presentation, I think this whole
issue of the values debate and the family values debate centers on
children and the well-being of children, and I suggest that is
where we put the focus.
4
Second, there is the issue of education. Many of us be lieve that
one of the arguments for paren- tal choice in education is to give
kids a chance to go into an environment where they will be taught
virtue. Consider the case of a child who is growing up without a
father and whose mom cares a whole lot about t h ese things but is
not terribly knowledgeable. This child. goes to a public school
which has decided that it cannot say anything in regard to values
or character, that it can- not teach anything about these
particular things. And the neighborhood, moreover , is dominated by
street gangs like the Bloods and the Crips. Where will the
instruction occur? Is it any wonder that a lot of kids have not
internalized these values? Where would they have been taught these
values if these institutions aren't working? Par e nts should be
able to send their children to a school that affirms their most
deeply held values. So, I think this.is a very serious matter.
Related to this in a fundamental way, I think the breakdown of the
family and other matters raises the possibility of the resurrection
of two kinds of institutions which I suppose we thought we had seen
the last of. One is the reform school, which I think we probably
need to have. Does it make more sense for New York City to spend
$30 million for metal detectors, or s h ould it have a couple of
very good, tough schools for very tough kids? The other kids are
given a chance to learn in the absence of those people who don't
want to learn in school, and the very tough kids are given a chance
to be saved from themselves by a very tough course of instruction
and discipl- ine. The orphanage is another institution that we
might have to bring back. The classic Hollywood scenario for
custody cases is where husband and wife are probably fighting over
custody. The problem with a lot of our custody cases in America is
that nobody shows up, nobody wants the child. What can we do in
that case? I believe we need to look seriously at the question of
orphan- ages; and with Professor James Q. Wilson, I agree that
somewhere between orphanage s and school choice, we probably need
to be thinking about giving parents a choice of sending their
children to residential schools where they will be free from the
kinds of problems that they face daily. I think crime is central to
these debates. Crime is in some ways fundamental to the present
problems of America and indicative of the breakdown of values in
our society and in our coun- try. Peggy Noonan has an excellent
essay in the September 14 issue of Forbe's magazine in which she
says, "It is a cliche to say it, but it can't be said enough: We
didn't lock the doors at night in the old America. We slept with
the windows open!" Fear is a large part of the American scene right
now. It is not just fear in the inner city or the cities, it is
fear in lots of places. I do not know the average number of locks
per house in my suburban Washington, D.C, neighborhood of Chevy
Chase, but it is pretty substantial. Other public policy questions
related to the values question bring us to the whole issue of
multicultura l ism. I have been in discussions where I have talked
about such things as civic-mind- edness, the deferral of
gratification, and the capacity for hard work, and I have been
accused of a Western bias. "Maybe that is not the way to live,"
people tell me. "Ma y be you are just seeing that through your
lens, in the same way that you were biased toward mothers and
fathers being at home with children." I was at a seminar this
summer at the Aspen Institute-not a conservative think tank at all-
and there were about f i ve of us conservatives and about a dozen
liberals. After four days most ev- erybody was prepared to concede
that the major cause of the difficulties of children in America had
to do with the dissolution of the family. I think that is progress
that that fa ct was acknowl- edged. I am not sure it would have
been acknowledged fifteen years ago.
5
But then, as soon as it was acknowledged, the group had to add,
"Well, that is just from this perspective of this society and this
culture. Maybe there is a cultura l bias there." We need to take up
that question, and we need to take up the related issue of how we
react to the whole question. of race. Race, I think, is still
something that a lot of people want to step around, quite timidly
dance around. Some people w i ll say, "Well, these are values that
maybe are appropriate for white people, but maybe not for black
people or 11ispanic people." I think we need to say what we
know-that these values are the values that will help all children,
and these are the kinds of t hings we should teach to all children.
And the final question is the place and role of religion in public
life. To my mind, it is a fact that for most Americans their
values-that is,-their morality@are anchored by religion. When they
look at their moral b e liefs and the values they pass on to their
children, they take much in- struction and inspiration, literally
and figuratively, fiom their religious commitment and belief. The
status of religion in American life and the status of the public
square-Father N e uhaus has written well about this-is a critical
question of public policy. I guess it was illustrated most dra-
matically in the Supreme Court's Lee v. Weisman decision on that
graduation exercise in Providence, Rhode Island. It turns up in
other contexts as well. We are trying to extinguish reli- gion from
modem American life, and it is having devastating consequences.
This, too, is a serious question of public policy. Let me close by
saying that I think as we carry on the values debate it is
important no t only that we recognize its complexity, but that we
not be afraid of it. Second, we must know that we are talking about
children primarily. Third, we must indicate these are not just
matters of opin- ion, or not just matters of how one feels as
opposed to how another feels. We must try to illustrate that these
issues have important institutional and public policy implications.
And fi- nally, we must carry on the discussion in a certain way and
in a certain tone. Recently I spoke at a meeting of the Christi a n
Coalition. I was very pleased with the audience. I thought we
talked well, in a serious way about serious things-things which I
have discussed this morning. But I said to them what I will end
with this morning. It is from the Epistle to the Ephesians, a n d
about how we should converse. "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and
anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with
all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving
one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiv e n you." My
point here is to suggest that we should be reminded in talking
about such serious things that we don't want to get in the way of
important and substantial issues by being hateful or by being a
clamorer. These things are far too important to sim ply stand and
posture. These are funda- mental matters of public policy upon
which a great deal of our future, and the future of this Republic,
rests.
Midge Decter: Coming on a program after Bill Bennett does
incline one somewhat to being a clamorer, becaus e there is not a
whole lot left to do when he gets through. So, I am going to begin
by expressing one disagreement with him-which shocks me, because I
never disagree with him. He said that these difficulties took root
25 years ago. I wish it were true; th a t would make them a lot
easier to deal with. But I am afraid they go a lot farther back.
Certainly their seeds go a lot farther back, and they are going to
be a lot more difficult to extirpate. The very fact that we have
come together today to talk about values is not the least evidence
that we feel ourselves to be, and indeed are, a society in a lot of
trouble, as was so brilliantly out- lined just before.
6
What are values anyway? To the extent that we don't mean
something trivial or dangerous by the use of the terrn@as_in, my
values are what I happen to like-and -your values are what you
happen to like-values are what result from an effort to articulate
something that precisely should not have to be-articulated. Take
the example put to use by- the R e publican Presidential campaign,
namely, family values. Here, once more, I have a slight
disagreement with Bill Bennett. He regrets that they have disap-
peared from the campaign. I am not sure that that is to be
regretted, given the level on which the iss u e of family was being
discussed in the first place. At least one's teeth are not going to
be set on edge for the remainder of the campaign. Imagine talking
about the value of families as if it were something open to
discussion, like tak- ing an aspirin a d ay, or establishing the
balance between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Families
can't be assigned a worth. They are, the way rocks are and clouds
and rainfall are-- sometimes welcomed and even beautiful, and
sometimes, truth be told, a major inconv e nience. For instance, no
matter how old you are, or rich in experience, or even
distinguished, your fam- ily are the people who always knew you
"when." If you are full of dreams and aspirations, they can just as
easily be the people trying to smother you a nd hold you back as
the ones offering help and encouragement. They are the people who
can just as easily leave you with a lifetime's worth of fears and
anxieties as with the courage to meet life's challenges and
difficulties. The story is told of Jimmy Ca r ter's mother-and just
from looking at pictures of her, I believe it: When her son came to
her and told her he was running for President, she said, "President
of what?" That, too, is a story about families. Because like many
phenomena of nature, the accept a nce of which has been corrupted
in our time-take gender, or for that matter, take death itself-the
family is simply not a voluntary mat- ter. It is the term on which
human existence is founded. Just as no amount of feminist demagogy
will ever make it poss i ble for women to be anything other than
what they ineluctably are, with the result that the recent effort
to help them "re-define" themselves has left them little more than
a bellyful of bitterness, so the fantasy that we can arrange the
nature of family c onnection to suit our preferences has pushed the
real flesh and blood families to the edge of a very steep
precipice. And at this place there is to be found not only
bitterness, but, as Bill was discussing before in great and grisly
detail, danger unto de a th. A family may in the end come to
include a lot of people-siblings, grandparents, aunts, un- cles,
cousins-but at its core is the fact that each human being who
arrives in this world is the product of two people-one male, one
female; one mother, one fat h er-and needs both the male and the
female kind of protection and nurture. Does this guarantee that
each new life will be a happy and healthy one? By no means. But it
is the necessary ground on which someone becomes a fully human
person. This is what peopl e are fooling around with when they try
to bring all the institutions of this society, including our
schools, under the sway of the idea that any kind of ar- rangement
is a family if its participants say it is. An alteration of the
meaning of human existen c e is what such people are up to. And
bear it in mind, if you are intrigued by the idea of the end of
history, that what we have here aspires to be no less than the end
of nature. All of us have come to live at a dangerous and
alienating distance from natu r e. An ordinary American kid-let's
not discuss the underclass for a change-living an ordinary,
American life, nowadays grows up almost unconscious of the bedrock
of living and dying. Births and deaths take place out of kids' view
in places called hospitals . Pain, far from being taken for
granted, is considered an offense to be preemptively obliterated.
Sex has become. something literally incon- sequential. Even many of
the inevitabilities of old age are cosmetically or medically
disguised. We are people who live in unproblematic intimacy with
such advanced forms of technology as
7
the automobile, or all those products of the micro-chip, and on
the other ha nd take courses of in- struction in how to give birth
to a baby. . Technology, that great treasure of wonders yielded up
to human intelligence from out of na- ture, has paradoxically
served to sever us from that nature. This is not intended to be a
compla i nt against technology. I am no Luddite, nor, as you can
plainly see, am I some 1960s flower child inveighing against the
modem world. Technology is a God-given blessing to mankind. I say
this fully mindful of the fact that had I, a grandmother of ten,
bee n speaking to you from this plat- form a hundred years ago, or
even fifty years ago, I would have been an old crone, bent over and
toothless-that is, if I had survived even to speak at all. Thus
those of us who live under the sway of technology are blessed
people. And-we in this room -are-doubly-blessed, for we not only
live with all the ease and comforts heaped upon us by human
ingenuity, we also live under a sys- tem of government created out
of the belief in our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and t h e
pursuit of happiness. Still, they have proven to be a combination,
this technology and this freedom, that seduces us into certain bad
spiritual habits. It has tempted us to dream that we can break out
of, surpass, the human condition itself. We are fore v er talking
about revolution in this society-I do not mean political
revolution-but something in its way as dangerous. There was, of
course, the sexual rev- olution. There was the end-of-nationalism
revolution, an idea that might nowadays amuse the Serbs. T here was
the civil-rights revolution, followed by the counterculture
revolution. I have for- gotten some of the others, but if I had
time, I could probably figure out a few more. We had a
44revolution" every five years-and a new generation to go with it.
T he point is, in a whole variety of ways, people were taking it
upon themselves to refuse the limits of existence. And they still
are. And we still are-I don't know why I said "they." The idea that
we can define things-the natural relations between men and women or
parents and children or teachers and students or intellectual
achievement-in short, that we can define exis- tence and its
reality any way we choose, is the idea that bedevils our age. You
know, if you watch late night television (as I do), and y o u watch
it regularly over time, you could come to believe that with the
expenditure of enough money we wouldn't have to die at all. There
are commercials about every five minutes advising us that four out
of 1,000 Ameri- cans die of this, and one out of a million
Americans die of that, and please give money. And behind that is
the unholy notion that we are somehow going to be able to overcome
the human condition, which is totally conditioned by our mortality.
It is true that we are luckier than our ancesto r s in many, many
ways, and we should remind ourselves of that fact and be grateful
for it every day. But at the same time, we have everything to learn
from them. Those guys back there, they were very smart, they were
easily as smart as we, and everything t h ey came to know about
human existence they had the kindness to write down in
libraries-ful of books, particularly in a book called the Bible.
Every single day they learned and left what they learned to us.
They learned out of the absolute bedrock of human expe- rience.
Since the world in which we live protects us from the very miseries
and struggles and strivings that they had to go through, the most
important thing we can have-and the most im- portant thing we can
give our Idds-is our connection to them. The best thing we have to
offer the children at this moment is the understanding that
everything they are and everything they know comes as the result of
somebody else's struggle, that we are all standing on the shoulders
of others.
8
This was, I think, once upon a time considered to be the
function of education. It certainly no longer is. But if we don't
return to that understanding that we are the beneficiaries of what
our forebears went through, and that therefore what is contained in
all those books is something meant to keep us tied to
ourown-existence, we are-going to be in.the soup.
* * 4.
Karl Zinsmelster: 1 want to begin by commending The Heritage
Foundation for taking up this davalues" issue in a systematic way.
Whenever regular Americans gath er around a dinner table today,
values qu6stioni'loorn laige. 'The public is woitied about the ways
our values are chang- ing. They want to talk about how we can get
on a better track. But around board room tables and in committee
rooms and at news desks, values are not considered a very reputable
topic for pub- lic debate. Talking about moral authority,
character, accountability, and so forth can get you into trouble.
The middle of American society and the top have different ideas
about the importance of v alues. This is reflected in folk
parlance. Take this joke I heard recently: "What's the difference
between John Gotti and the current political candidates? Gotti has
convictions." If value questions gain more national attention in
the future, I'll be enco u raged-because per- sonal attitudes and
behaviors are extremely important. Healthy values have made most of
our society's current successes possible; harmful values are behind
most of our central failures. Let me quickly run through a series
of proposition s outlining some of the specific reasons why val-
ues matter, and why they are worth careful guarding. Proposition
One is that upholding time-tested values is humane. The favorite
media chatter today is that values are a "wedge issue"--that the
values deba t e is being pushed by disingenuous operators whose
real agenda is to score political points by bashing and dividing
their fellow Americans. Values are just a cudgel for attacking
cultural opponents, in this interpretation. I want to argue that
that is inac c urate and unfair. Because the truest reason for
defending tradi- tional cultural values is that they are the
choices likeliest to make people happy and secure in the long run.
Let me illustrate this with a story I heard recently. It seems two
individuals w ere driv- ing down a highway in a large truck when
they came to a bridge underpass with a big, stem sign in front of
it reading "Absolutely no vehicles over I F 3" allowed." They
pulled over to the shoulder and got out their measuring tape, and
it turned o ut their truck was 12'4" tall. At this point, the
second guy looked to the driver and asked, "So whadya think we
should do?" Ile driver glanced both ways, then answered: "Not a cop
in sight .... Let's chance it." There are some rules, obviously,
that it i s futile to flaunt. All we do in ignoring them is endan-
ger ourselves and those traveling with us. This is especially true
when it is cultural, as opposed to legalistic rules that we are
breaking. Most often, those guidelines are there for our own good.
T h e informal laws that traditionally governed family structure
are an excellent example of this. The big, yellow "Not Allowed"
signs that existed in this area were there not to punish or harass,
but to try and save as many people as possible from finding ou t
what can happen when you drive unprepared into the hard rocks or
steel girders of reality. How many of the people claiming that
traditional values serve no purpose, or are needlessly
constricting, or mean-spirited realize that a child's chances of
being a bused are forty times higher in a non-traditional family
than in a traditional one? That children growing up in non-tra-
ditional families are three times likelier to end up with emotional
or behavioral problems? How many are aware that adults living in n
a tural, intact families experience significantly lower rates of
problem drinking, mental disorder, stress, violence, criminality,
incarceration, and suicide? That the poverty rate of married,
two-parent families is only one-sixth that of non-intact counter -
9
parts? Traditional values are humane, and their primary
beneficiaries are their practitioners. That's my first proposition.
Proposition Two is that traditional values are practical. The
anti-values crowd often asserts that the values debate is a ho llow
one, full of empty symbols, raised mostly out of nostalgia. Values
renovation, it is often claimed, offers no-solution to today's real
social problems. This is badly mistaken. People who believe an
emphasis on values is ineffectual should look closel y at some
careful econometric studies published a few years ago. by the
National Bureau of Economic Research. They show that attitudinal
factors-like acceptance of the idea of commit- ting an illegal act,
for instance-are significant influences on whet.her - an individual
will be successful in school and in the labor market. Perhaps most
interestingly, these studies show that, all other factors being
equal, inner city resi- dents who go to church are far less likely
to commit a crime or use drugs or drop out o f school, and that
they are more likely to hold a job. Religious attendance is a more
accurate predictor of these things than whether an individual lived
in public housing, or grew up in a single-parent household, or had
parents who received welfare. "Chu r chgoing is associated with
substantial dif- ferences in the behavior of youths ... [it]
affects allocation of time, school attendance, work activity, and
the frequency of socially deviant activity," concludes principal
researcher Richard Freeman. Churchgo i ng, he says, is the
background factor that most affects who escapes from inner-city
poverty. Likewise, a major 1990 study done for the Girl Scouts of
America by Louis Harris and Associ- ates, Robert Coles, and James
Davidson Hunter found that religious yo u ngsters are much likelier
than the non-religious to avoid anti-social acts and to engage in
altruistic activities. Rich kids who are religious and poor kids
who are religious "have far more in common with each other in terms
of their moral decision-making and their priorities than [religious
and non-religious kids] of the same socioeconomic group," summarize
the authors. Influencing values is actually a very effective way of
heading off and solving social problems -better by far than simply
applying Band-A i ds and trying to control damage after the fact.
I've said in the past that if you're standing on a riverbank and
notice a string of folks floating by half- drowned, you of course
had better try to fish out as many as possible. But you also had
better send someone upstream to see what's pushing them in.
Emphasizing values can help you accom- plish both tasks. Take
heading off problems: It's a fact that blacks and whites allke have
a nine out of ten chance of staying out of poverty if they simply
finish high school and avoid having a baby out of wedlock (two
fairly elemental disciplines). Or take solving problems: It isn't
adequately appreci- ated that far more low-income persons get
themselves out of poverty and off welfare by marrying or
re-marrying than by any other method. In other words. Marriage and
family solidarity work. Self-control, self-improvement, and per-
sonal responsibility work. Changing values is a very practical way
of changing the world, and public policy ought to acknowledge this.
That's P r oposition Two. Proposition Three is that strong, healthy
values are critical to national prosperity. They are not a frill.
The present day is characterized by a declining significance of
things material and a great upswing in the importance of capacities
o f mind and soul. Things like. reserves of ore and inches of
topsoil have relatively little bearing on international success and
influence anymore. National riches are now measured in human
attitudes and aptitudes, in personal behaviors and productive habi
ts.
10
And the hard truth is, some of our competitors-particularly the
highly-disciplined, kin-based societies of Asia-are doing better on
the attitudes and aptitudes front today than we are. In pres-
ent-day Japan, only one percent of all births are ill egitimate,
versus well over a quarter in this country. The divorce rate is
one-fourth U.S. levels. Some 95 percent of all Japanese children
live in a married, two-parent household. The good news is that
these family-oriented, strong-values cultures are ou t there as
exemplars and prods to keep us honest, to keep us from collapsing
into the conclusion that we can't, or needn't, do any better. The
bad news is, should we fail to halt the decay of American values,
these people may inherit our mantle. Almost exa c tly one 'month
ago, the dir .ector.of Japan's Eco.nomic Planning Agency was quoted
in the Wall Street Journal as saying he believes Japan's GNP will
overtake that of the U.S. within the next twenty years, and that
this will put officials in Tokyo in a pos i tion to "impose fiscal
and monetary discipline on the United States." When I read this my
first response, as a patriot, was, "See you on the playing field,
pal." But then I had a second reaction. I thought to myself, "Well,
you know it's true we liberal, m odem Americans haven't done such a
great job on the discipline front-whether fiscal and monetary or
otherwise." And part of me decided that an international values
competition might not be such a bad thing. May the best values win.
This is, in many ways, t he ultimate competitiveness issue. For
that reason, I don't think we can even consider accepting our
current standards as a given. There is no guarantee we will succeed
in reversing our values collapse, but we have no choice other than
to try. Proposition Four is a warning about tactics, namely: more
money won't do the job. One of the favorite tricks of modem
liberalism is to remake ethical and social issues into economic
issues. Thus, crime becomes a product of insufficient welfare
budgets. Weak parenting and inadequate early nurturing of children
are blamed on a lack of daycare subsidies. Soaring illegitimacy is
at- tributed to an insufficient number of factory jobs in inner
cities. The modem crisis in fatherhood and male responsibility is
reduced to a qu e stion of collecting child support payments a
little more efficiently. And we get the incongruity of the nation's
major response to a horrible, murder- ous riot being an aid package
for real estate building. Modem liberals hate to discuss values and
ethics , cultural and character problems. They want to talk mostly
about dollars-which are cool, neutral, and impersonal. They don't
want to take on the sticky, uncomfortable task of changing
individual life courses, so they pretend that the process of making
phy s ical and moral progress can be simplified into a matter of
distributing missing funds. That way, no tough personal choices
have to be made, and no one's guilt gets tweaked. The problem is,
it won't work. Money won't solve today's major social problems. Th
i s leads to my fifth proposition, which is that the crucial public
work of our era is moral transformation, centered around new public
emphasis on family integrity and personal responsi- bility. Society
can't stop an unconcerned father from deserting his d e pendents.
We can't stop a pregnant woman from lighting her crack pipe.
Straightforward financial and regulatory remedies can't address
these pressing problems, because they are, at root, moral
disorders. Our best hope is, instead, to persuade men and wome n to
stop doing such things to themselves and each other. As the old
evangelical promise relates, if we can take the slums out of
people, people will take themselves out of the slums. We must work
from the inside out. The problem for policy makers, of cour s e, is
that the government is not at all equipped to ac- complish these
kinds of transformations. What's really wanted today is more public
diplomacy outside government channels-more media debate and
conversation, more literary shouts from the rooftops, mo re moral
suasion and advocacy. Elected officials can help by prodding and
en- couraging, but the real action must come on the cultural, not
political, front.
11
For maximum effect, these efforts should focus at the level of the
family. The family is the only institution that can reliably
cultivate the mental capacities and disciplines crucial to personal
success. Whether we're talking about education or battling d rugs
or just reversing social alien- ation, the family-has to be
the-main staging ground. One-of the clearest, bitterest lessons of
current social science research is that society's capacity to
remedy damage done early on in deficient families is extremel y
limited. You can set up Head- Start centers and WIC outlets and
reform schools and mentoring programs on every city block, but so
long as families are unhealthy you will still face crippling social
problems. The erosion of family loyalties has to be reve r sed. The
other bit of moral transformation that is desperately needed today
is a personal responsibil- ity revolution. Beginning in the 1960s,
we experienced a rights crusade in this country. The upshot is that
"rights" have now become, in George Will's w o rds, "sharp elbows
to throw against one another." They have become licenses for
self-indulgence, for anti-social behavior, for the flaunting of all
cultural norms. The lack of accountability we see so often in
today's radically rights-based society is not some inexplicable
accident. I'd say we've gotten about what we asked for. We
shouldn't be shocked that we're experiencing so much irresponsible
divorce, for instance. After all, it's fun to run off with your
secretary-and we've made divorce incredibly eas y and cost-free. We
consciously got rid of all the things that once discouraged it.
We've allowed a system to grow up under which anti-social behaviors
are profitable, rather than punishing. Unless we launch a
responsibility rev- olution to reverse those i n centives, we're
going to continue to get lots of destructive behavior. This brings
me to my last proposition, which is that, contrary to widespread
claims, resisting values decay is not a hopeless cause. Personal
attitudes and behaviors are mutable, and t h ere are lots of
precedents for significant values turnabouts. Ideas about
masculinity and femininity, for instance, have been firmly revised
in recent years-with the androgynists, who were the anti-tra-
ditionalists in this case, getting their clocks clea n ed. We've
had a sharp and lasting drop in drug use since the late 1970s.
There have been dramatic changes in behavior in areas like diet and
smoking. Attitudes toward race have shifted enormously. There is a
cycle of religious ebbs and revivals in this co u ntry going back
many decades. Values change is possible. And remember that, as
egregious as the values meltdown has been among our chattering
class, within the massive middle of American society there remains
an enormous reservoir of good sense and tradit i onal habit. I
don't believe defenders of traditional American values need to gain
50 percent of the airtime to win the debate, they just need a good
minority chunk-because on topics like the family, gender, crime,
religion, and morals, popular instincts a n d experience are
basically on their side. A whole lot fewer Americans believe in
Madonna than believe in God. What people who care about values
really need in order to connect with their natural allies among the
infantry is a popular campaign-replete with pamphlets and magazine
articles, and videos, and loud music that subverts the smug
certainties of reigning elites, and Allan Bloom books and Tom Wolfe
novels, and religious activists, and TV commercials showing eggs
Erying with a voiceover that warns, "Th i s is your soul listening
to an Ice-T album," and tee-shirts say- ing, "I do" on the front
and on the back, "Till death do us part." To quote George Gerbner,
"If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who
makes its laws." Of course, laws and officeholders are themselves
an important influence on private attitudes and morals, so it would
be useful to have government leaders play a part in this campaign
of cul- tural change. The truth is, we wouldn't have to go very far
back in public polic y to find better ways of running government
programs. I was struck by a little anecdote in Nick Lemann's recent
book on the great migration of blacks to Northern cities. One of
the families he follows wanted
12
to get an apartment in a brand new public housing project in
Chicago.; However, a rule in effect at that time-and this was only
about 25 years ago or so-disqualified unmarried couples from being
given public apartments. Guess how these protagonists solved that
problem? They got mar- ried the nex t day. I'm convinced a good
deal of this kind of thing would still happen today, given- the
right cir- cumstances and the right help and encouragement. Of
course we can't overturn human nature. But we can do a much better
job of connecting actions with con s equences. And when the activ-
ists start shouting that we lack compassion, we need to shout back
that the most humane path is not necessarily the one of least
resistance. My friend Ben Wattenberg recendy argued thaifolio"wing
the "" N'ix-on46-C'hina7 mode l , a theo- retical President Clinton
could do the country a huge favor by bringing liberals to heel on
the values question. Ben said that if President, Clinton would have
an opportunity "to use govern- ment to reform the liberalism that
has eroded the Amer i can responsibility standard." I say, "Good
idea, but I'm not holding my breath." After all, the reaction of
the values-free crowd to any values campaign is always a
denunciatory hurricane. Ben himself describes the forces against
any values restoration as "titanic: feminists, gay rights and civil
rights groups, the civil liberty lobby, some unions-each with huge
constituencies, each looking for responsibility-free goodies." He
point out that "the last time we had a moderate Southern Democratic
President- P r esident Jimmy Carter-he got rolled by
special-interest, no-fault, free-lunch Democratic liber- 99 als.
So, anyone hoping to defend traditional cultural standards today
needs to be prepared for a huge fight. If, however, a set of
principled, generous-spiri ted proponents of what could be called
natural, time-tested values can connect with their public, this is
a very winnable war.
13
PANELI1 Kate O'Beirne: I am Kate O'Beirne, Vice President for
Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. This panel an d
our two guests have been asked to talk-about what government should
or shouldn't do to promote those values we have just heard talked
about so compellingly by our previous panel. We posed a few
questions to our two guests this morning: Should the gov- e r nment
be pursuing certain policies in the area of welfare, education,
health care, crime, or tax policy in support of those values we
have talked about? Alternatively, are there areas with re- spect to
promoting values where one would rather not see the g o vernment
involved. And how important is -it to -recognize the-inhe m-nt.
limitations -of-gove m-ment4n -pro m-oting values-a point Karl
Zinsmeister made just a few minutes ago. To address these important
issues we couldn't have two more able panelists. Ou r first speaker
is Michael Schwartz, who is Director of the Free Congress Center
for Social Policy right here in Washington and a leading pro-family
scholar and activist. Michael is the au- thor of three books and
co-author of three more as well as hundred s of articles which have
appeared in scores of secular and religious publications. He was
editor of the quarterly Journal of Family and Culture from 1986 to
1988, and he is a popular lecturer and frequent guest on both radio
and television. Active in the p r o-life movement for twenty years,
Michael is one of the founding Directors of March of Life. During
1987 and 1988 Michael served as a social policy advisor to the
presidential campaigns of Jack Kemp, Pete du Pont, and George Bush
and he is still frequentl y consulted by members of Congress and
the executive branch on social policy issues. I am one of many who
have counted on Michael's wise counsel over the years. Our second
guest is Representative Vin Weber. At the age of 28 he was the
second-youngest congr e ssmen ever sent to Washington, and
currently represents Minnesota's Second Congres- sional District.
In 1978, Vin managed the successful Senate campaign of Rudy
Boschwitz and in 1979-1980, he served as Senator Boschwitz's senior
Minnesota aide, specializi n g, back in Min- nesota, in areas
dealing with the economy, the family, and agricultural issues.
Since his election to Congress in 1980, he has continued to focus
on these issues. Before the start of the 101st Con- gress, Vin
Weber was elected by his Repub l ican colleagues to serve as
Secretary to the House Republican Conference, one of eight elected
Republican leadership positions, and as a member of the leadership,
he helps set legislative strategy and regularly counsels the
President. The Wall Street Jour n al has said of Vin Weber, "If
politicians were stock, Vin Weber would be a long-term blue chip."
Vin Weber's unique talents will be sorely missed in January when
the House recon- venes without him present. But we know that the
new challenges Vin has chose n to pursue will provide a different
opportunity for him to continue in making the very important
contribution we have all come to expect of him. Please join me in
welcoming both of our speakers this morning.
Michael Schwartz: In medicine there is an old pr overb; in the
Latin, primum non nocere-first do no harm. It would be a wise adage
for government policy makers to follow when they address family
policy. Charles Murray, Alan Carlson, Karl Zinsmeister, and many
other conservative and neo-conservative scho l ars have chronicled
the ways in which government policies have had the unintended
consequence of destroying the family. Nowhere has this happened
more than among the urban underclass, who have been most subject to
the beneficent ministrations of the welfa re state, and who are
suffering a poverty that is greater than any poverty ever known
in
14
American history. This is not a material poverty: cash income,
calorie intake, and other related measures of material well-being
are certainly better than the c onditions of most of the world, and
better than the material conditions in which most Americans lived
through most of our nation's history. This poverty is far deeper
and leaves far more grievous scars than mere material deprivation,
for it is the poverty of a destroyed culture, and above all, a
poverty characterized by a lack of family formation. When millions
of children are growing up in our society, not having a father
themselves, not even knowing anyone who has a father, not knowing
what a father is f o r, how can they achieve the responsibility for
family formation when they reach adulthood? They don't know how to
do,it.1s it any wonder, then,-that-we increasingly --see- a
situation in which the pay- off of this condition is simply a black
hole in our i n ner-city communities-or non-communities, I should
say? The ethic of community has been taken away from them and
replaced by well- meaning, but curiously misguided government
policies. We know what went wrong. We know that when the welfare
state steps in a n d takes the role of the father, when jobs for
men disappear and are replaced by jobs for women; when men become
redundant in a society, they really have nothing else to do except
engage in violence and crime, go to jail, and fall into various
form s of se l f-destructive conduct that creates a vicious cycle.
That is the worst problem we face, but let's move up a step. Our
middle-class families are fall- ing apart, too. Why? Because of a
culture of selfishness. Because somewhere after World War 11 the
ground s hifted from thinking of the first person in the plural to
thinking of the first person simply as a singular-from we to
me-looking at life as the apple that is going to give me sads-
faction. Some people attribute this to the fe miinist movement, but
I thi n k the feminist movement is more a symptom of a general
trend of selfishness rather than the cause of it. Women can be just
as selfish as men, but men are just as selfish as women. Let's look
at the feminist movement simply as a case history of how this ha p
pened. Betty Friedan diagnosed the situation: affluent, suburban
housewives were bored. Well, no wonder! They didn't have to milk
cows any more, as their grandmothers had. Now there were plenty of
good things affluent suburban women could do, and many of t hem did
good things: they got in- volved in volunteer activities, went to
school, or developed various talents. But they found that some of
the men in their lives were not particularly respectful of women.
In other words, the cul- tural standard that had d ominated the
relations between men and women had broken down. Why? Because of
selfishness. Too many men ceased to be good men. The reaction to
that is that many women stopped being good women. This mutual
abandonment of a sense of responsibility produced a cultural
attitude of selfishness which resulted in the widespread feeling
that, "If I am not getting maximum satis- faction out of my life, I
have a right to trade it in for a new life." That was the motive
force that led to the explosion of divorce. Eve r y year more than
a million children in the United States are orphaned by the divorce
of their parents. That is a devastating thing psychologically. Once
again, the numbers are in, the research is done, and the damaging
effects of divorce are conclusively d emonstrated. . Making it
worse is that the law has done harm to the institution of marriage,
which is the foun- dation of families, and therefore the foundation
of society. We had a situation, inherited from the whole tradition
of Western civilization, in which it was assumed that a marriage
was a contract, in a spiritual sense, between a man, a woman, and
God; and in a civil sense, a contract between a man, a woman, and
society. Marriage has a social purpose-regardless of the individual
satisfac- tion peo ple derive from it, regardless of the religious
dimension-it has a social function. And the state, therefore, was
the guarantor of the marital bond. To eliminate that marriage bond,
the
15
burden of proof was on the person who wanted the marriage disso
lved. The state was there to say, "This marriage will stand because
it is necessary for the good functioning of society for mar- riages
to be stable." Otherwise, everybody's marriage is unstable if the
marital bond is not secure. That standard could not s u rvive a
generation of selfishness. Beginning in 1970 we saw the in-
troduction of "no fault" divorce laws. "No faule'divorce, in
principle, says that the state will take no position regarding the
just man's claim and the unjust man's claim. Now, if there i s any-
thing that violates the first principle of justice, that is it: to
draw no distinction, no discrimination, between a person who has
kept faith and someone who has broken faith. And yet, that is -the
condition in which- we find--the fundamental inst i tution -of
society. So, all of us, re- gardless of our religious commitments,
regardless of how deeply in love we may be, all of us, if we are
married,-are civilly in a perfectly tentative arrangement that
could end at any minute. The state is no longer t h e guarantor of
the marital bond; it is, in fact, a dissolvent force. So, at the
same time that the state is retarding family formation by
subsidizing family fragments in which a father is never present, it
is also attacking the marriages that do exist. Th e se are
fundamental is- sues. We see the state doing harm to marriage. We
move on to the next dimension, the functions of families. There is
no more solemn obliga- tion for parents than to educate their
children. The previous panel dealt with the disaster w e have in
education, but the essential problem here is that the state, once
again, has taken over the func- tions that formerly were fulfilled
by families and that ought to be fulfilled by families. Namely, it
has removed from parents the control over the education of their
children, and above all, re- moved from parents the primary
responsibility for the moral formation of children. Government is a
moral enterprise in the sense that government can affect the way
individuals behave by rewarding virtue and r estraining vice. What
we see over and over again is government rewarding vice and
punishing virtue. We see it in our tax policy: the tax burden has
risen most heavily on families supporting children. Right after
World War II, when the income tax had to be expanded to pay off the
war debt, Congress deliberately designed a pro-family tax policy in
such a fashion that the average worker with the average number of
children had no federal income tax liability. What has happened
since then is that as incomes hav e grown and inflation has in-
creased, and as social status has changed, the tax burden on single
people and on married people without children has remained
relatively stable, but the tax burden on families with children has
gone up astronomically-especial l y the Social Security tax, which
is regressive and brutally bur- densome for working class families.
That has made it more difficult for families to survive on a single
income-which ought to be taken as a measure of economic justice in
society. When I was a child, most working men could support their
families and own a home without the necessity of having a second
income in the household. That is not the case today. It was barely
the case when I was a young man. Most young people, unless they
happen to be e xceptionally fortunate either in where they live or
in the income they are able to make, do not believe they will ever
be able to afford their own house and do not believe that they can
survive on one income. Therefore, they are discouraged from having
ch ildren.
Ben Wattenberg has chronicled the birth dearth. One thing he
failed to note in his book of that title-he may have noted it
elsewhere-is that the birth dearth is a class-directed phenomenon.
There is no birth dearth in the lowest one-fifth of the income sc a
le, because government subsi- dizes out-of-wedlock childbearing
among the poor. There is not a particular birth dearth at the top
end of the income scale, because people who are well off feel less
insecure about their future, and therefore more confident in having
children. Where children are disappearing is among the working
class and the middle class.
16
Why? Not because working class and middle-class couples don't
like children. It is because they are afraid they cannot afford
them. We have seen the median age of marriage rise to an all- time
high. We have seen people defer childbearing until their late
thirties. Having two children is a large family thesedays. One of
the contributing factors, in addition to selfishnessand-other moral
issues, is a t a x structure that discourages family building. Now;
why attack those institu- tions that are most valuable to the
health of society, namely, middle-class families? Let me mention
just one other area of policy, and that is crime. One of the basic
things tha t children need to be taught-if you are a parent, you
know they need to be taught this because they don't know it by
instinct-is that there is such a thing as right and wrong, that
good con- duct gets rewarded and bad conduct gets
punished-Me-struggle agai n st this knowledge; it does not come
naturally. Among the things that enable us to internalize the
notion that there is good and evil, and that our actions have
consequences, is the social affirmation of standards of good and
bad conduct. We are living in a society now which does not punish
crime; we are living in a society which punishes the victims of
crime. Children see that the application of justice is a capricious
thing-especially children who grow up in a city like Washington.
They see that the polic e are able to capture maybe 4 percent or 5
percent of the people who commit crimes, and that the courts
eventually convict maybe half of those. We have known criminals to
walk out of court on technicalities, when everyone knows that they
committed the crim e they are accused of. And then, once they are
convicted, many criminals live better in prison than they did out
on the street. Is it any wonder that young people who are growing
up in a disorganized society perceive that the rewards go to the
drug dealers and the gang members, and that there is no future in a
school which is there simply to keep you off the streets? With so
few positive role models, is it any wonder that they rationally
make the decision (and from their perspective it is not an
irrational d ecision) to enter a life of crime? Crime, in other
words, is fostered by the capriciousness of a criminal justice
system that has handed over control of our nation's city streets to
the thugs. And it is ratified when we see things like the Los
Angeles rio t rewarded by political pay-offs-pay-offs for bad
behavior. That is the mixed message that young people get about
crime. And about sex: now schools distribute con- doms. We have a
multi-million dollar program to make sure that no child will be
without cont r aceptives. These are insane things! One of the
reasons why we have them is because of liberals-and I use that term
in the current sense, which really means somebody who has taken
leave of his senses. The old liberalism-the liberalism of Hubert
Humphrey, o f John Kennedy, of Franklin Roosevelt-had a vision of
soci- ety that was coherent and consistent with the American
tradition. The new liberalism of these people who abandon moral
principles is inconsistent with any tradition. They insist that
there is no c o nsensus on morality, that, in fact, morality has no
place in the public debate. That is wrong. Of course, there are
debated issues in our society. But on most is- sues, the
overwhelming majority of the American people do agree about right
and wrong. I hav e yet to meet someone in debate who is willing to
stand up and say that he thinks it is a good thing for
fourteen-year-old kids to fornicate. And yet my taxes go to
subsidize that fornication. I have yet to meet in debate anyone who
stands up and says it i s a good thing for young people to be en-
ticed into homosexual behavior. And yet we have government programs
to do that. I have yet to meet anyone who claims that looting
should be encouraged, but it is the neighborhoods where the looters
live that get th e rewards, while the law-abiding pay for it. Why?
Because the people who know better are unwilling or intimidated
against standing up and saying that behavior is
1 7
wrong and we cannot condone it. And that is one of the things I
think the conservative move- ment needs to find ways of saying, and
saying convincingly.
0 400 40,
Vin Weber: I would like to back up a little bit. I think the first
question for conservatives is,"How expansive a role do we want to
see government play in affirming values?" Ther e is a de- bate
across the spectrum of conservative thinking about that subject. I
take a fairly expansive view. The government injects itself into
the moral debate all the time, as Mike made very clear. The left
says that the government "should be'neutra l on values
questions--only when it is our side's values questions. There is no
suggestion, for instance, that the government should be neu- tral
on the question of civil rights, which ultimately is a moral issue,
either in its traditional sense or in the e x pansion of the
definition of civil rights that we see today to include gays and
lesbians and to give animals rights. There is no argument there on
the left about utilizing the government as an instrument of moral
change. I think we have to decide first an d foremost that we are
not going to simply react to that by saying, "No, the government
should not be involved in the moral debate. We really take a
Libertarian view. We are conservatives after all, and we are
distrustful of government." I think you can ha v e a long
discussion about whether or not government has ever been essen-
tially neutral, even when there was a much smaller role for
government in people's lives. But certainly today, with government
as intrusive as it is, you have to at least begin by sa y ing, "All
right, government is involved in people's lives. The question is,
what set of values is government going to promote and reinforce, or
on the other hand, to erode and undermine?" By the way, I think we
can do better if we confront that debate and say, "We certainly
want to legislate moral- ity. We have a set of values we want the
government to promote. We want government institutions to reinforce
certain policies. Now let's get to the debate about what those
values and policies are." Pro-family is a pretty good bumper
sticker, and it is also a good organizing instrument for gov-
ernment policy. You can say as a policy maker, "I believe that
strengthening the family by tilting government policies in favor of
traditional families is good-good for eve r ybody." It doesn't mean
that we are against people who are not part of traditional
families, whether they are single or divorced or whatever. It just
means that the family is good for society; we want to tilt every
policy that we conceivably can towards s t rengthening the family.
The most important one affecting the American family is tax policy,
as Mike mentioned. The most radical change in tax policy in our
lifetime has never been voted on by the Congress, and certainly
never appeared on the front page of any newspaper-that is the
erosion of the value of the personal exemption. Add to that the
increase in the FICA tax in recent years, and you have just
dramatically tilted tax policy against families and children. We
ought to say explicitly that we want tax policy to strengthen and
reinforce families, because we believe that traditional fami- lies
should be strengthened, that everyone is better off when strong,
stable, traditional families exist. This does not require us to
condemn everyone else, but simply t o affirm the traditional fam-
ily as a building block of society. Educational choice is in the
same category. And probably the greatest victory for family policy
in recent years was related to that in the debate over childcare in
the 102nd Congress. There were a lot of conservatives and
Republicans who said when the childcare debate opened that there
should be no government role in childcare. But it became evident
immediately that there was going to be a government childcare
policy. The question was, were we going to enact a policy which
would lead inevitably toward a system of federally subsidized
childcare centers and a vol-
18
urne of regulations that would basically bankrupt or eliminate all
private childcare providers, or were we going to empower p arents
to make those choices for themselves? Although the outcome wasn't
perfect, we basically won. We won by affirming that we wanted a
pro-parent, pro-family childcare policy,-not-a pro-state,
pro-government childcare policy. That, I believe, is the for e
runner of what will be probably the greatest victory for our values
in the 1990s-to extend that very same principle to education. It is
going to become very difficult for the left to maintain the public
school monopoly after a generation of parents have m a de their own
choices about childcare providers. No one is going to be able to
tell them that they were smart enough to make the choice when their
children were one or two, but they are not smart enough to
make-that -choice -when the kids -get to-be-four-- o r-five
or.-six. People will automatically reject that. I think we will win
that debate in the 1990s. However, the issue is not just about
individual freedom, which is how conservatives prefer to cast that
debate. It is a conscious policy on our part to sa y that a family
is stronger when they have to make those decisions for and by
themselves. It might actually be a little bit more difficult than
simply sending your kid off to the government childcare center and
not having to think about it, not having to w o rry about it, not
having to pay for it-except indirectly, through taxes. But you
force families to make decisions about their own future, to take
responsibility for their own children's future, their own
children's education, and get involved in their sch o ols. We want
that policy, not just because it enhances freedom, but because with
that freedom comes a reinforcement of a social unit that we believe
is the building block of society. I think the same current runs
through welfare policy and health care pol i cy. And so, I would
argue that con- servatives need to resolve for themselves the idea
that government plays an active role in what we describe as a
cultural war. We shouldn't be apologetic about that. ff in the
future you get to the point where the gover n ment truly withers
away, then you can argue about whether or not government's role in
affirming or eroding values should also wither way. But, in this
society, and for our lifetime, government will be either on our
side or on some other side in the values de- bate. In addition,
there is another critical aspect of the values debate that should
not be overlooked. That is the value of entrepreneurship. I
remember listening to Michael Novak several times in the mid- 1980s
when we were fighting to save Central A merica and South America
from Commu- nism. He talked about the failure of South America and
Central America to develop sound economic policies as North America
had done. How can this be explained when there is no real
difference between our country and th e irs in terms of resources
and population? One of the points he made, which has stuck with me,
is that in North America, in contrast to South America and Central
America, the entrepreneur has always been a heroic figure. The ma-
jority of North Americans a l ways believed that people like
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie were
heroes. These men went out and made something of them- selves, made
themselves great successes, put a lot of people to work, and
created a product or service that i s available today. Those are
the. heroes of the North American culture to an extent they never
were in Latin culture, and that has hindered the development of the
Latin economies. The idea of entrepreneurship is tied to the
discussion of family values bec a use we want to stress that
individual parents should be lionized, should be made heroic in
terms of having re- sponsibility for choosing their children's
childcare and educational systems, and that the tax codes should be
tilted in their favor. Parents to d ay are engaging in a heroic
enterprise. Similarly, we want to promote the individuals in the
economic sphere who take personal responsibility, take risks, and
go out and actually do something for themselves and for their
society. They, too, should be lion ized. I think that
entrepreneurship as a value is more than just an economic policy.
19
It is a value that we want government to reinforce, in most cases,
by not doing anything to hinder or discourage its development.
20
PANEL III
Stuart Butler: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Stuart Butler and I
am Director of Domestic Policy Studies here at The Heritage
Foundation. Welcome to our final,panel, where we-are to ex- plore
the issues of what we can do to restore values to the culture .
Earlier Karl Zinsmeister sug- gested that maybe government wasn't
particularly good at changing attitudes, changing the basic culture
of a society. Don Eberly, in one of the questions to the previous
panel, asked us to think about how to influence cultur e and the
politics of influencing culture. Our first speaker is an old
colleague of mine from The Heritage Foundation, Dinesh D'Souza, who
is well-known in the public culture for his book Illiberal
Edu6ation, which addressed the whole issue of political co r
rectness in our universities. He is a Resident Fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute and was Managing Editor of Policy
Review here at the Foundation. Next to him is David Horowitz, who
is President of the Center for the Study of Popular Cul- ture in
Los Angeles. He was previously editor of Rainparts magazine. He is
a graduate of Berkeley (if I stopped at this point, you might all
be walking out). But he is more recently co-au- thor of a book,
Destructive Generations, and several other books, includin g
Deconstructing the Left, and many articles. Elizabeth Wright is
well-known at Heritage as a contributor to our publications. She is
editor of the quarterly newsletter Issues and Views, based in New
York City. This is a publication which looks very much a t arguing
for the kind of values-self help, strong families-in the black
community that we talked about more generally earlier. The final
speaker will be Dr. Michael Joyce, who is President and CEO of the
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwau k ee,
Wisconsin. Previously, he was Director of the Institute for
Educational Affairs in New York, and has held many other positions,
including as a teacher of the History of Political Science at the
secondary level. So without further ado, I ask Dinesh to kick
things off.
* * 4.
Dinesh D'Souza: The topic is quite a difficult one. I think the
crisis of values is, to some de- gree, endemic to a democratic
society. In fact, in Plato's Republic you read that the crisis of
de- mocracy is, in part, generational . There is an inherent
tension between young people and old people, and part of the
problem comes from the failure of parents, who obstinately refuse
to obey their children.
In our society, I think, we are facing a breakdown of cultural
consensus, which h as given rise to the debate about values. And
the great subjectivity of the term "values" implies that there is
no agreement on what constitutes the first principles of our
society. It is significant that issues, top- ics, themes that could
once taken for granted now have to be argued about; for example,
the term "families." It was hardly a matter of argument a
generation ago-perhaps even a few years ago -as to what constituted
the desirable state or anatomy or structure of an American family.
Now that sub j ect is very much up for grabs. In politics, an
argument is won when your issue ceases to be controversial. The
question of the desirability of intact families is now something
that is highly controversial. I think the cultural debate comes
down to fundame ntally a moral debate, which is a debate over what
constitutes the moving principle or the animating force of our
society.
2 1
One side of this debate-our side, if you will-invokes
traditional morality, what we call tra- ditional values. And the
other sid e, if you will, does not invoke a new morality. It does
not make a good argument for an alternate state of being. It
invokes the right to select among a wide menu of values. This
deification of choice itself is largely indifferent to the content
of the ch o ice. We value the act of choosing more so than what
specifically is being chosen. The larger, intellectual framework, I
think, for the debate about value is the philosophical sys- tem
that goes by the name of relativism, which in contemporary
manifestatio n reveals itself as either cultural relativism or
moral relativism. Who is to say that Western Civilization is in any
de- gree superior and more advanced than that of other cultures?
Who is to say, for example, that the lifestyle of heterosexuality
is in - a ny way more desirable-than that-of homosexuality? There
is the kind of studied and sophisticated indifference to the
choices that are made. And yet the issue of relativism, although it
seems to propose a strong, philosophical challenge to
conservatives, i s to some degree, I think, a misleading issue. The
reason -for this is that we can comb our society and we can
certainly comb the ranks of the political left, and you would be
very hard-pressed just to find a relativist. I have been wandering
somewhat norn a dically to campuses of this country, and I have, in
all honesty, yet to meet a true relativist. I have met
deconstructionists, and many of them it turns out on close
examination have a certain political agenda which is revealed in
the selection of the ide a s that they choose. They are interested
in deconstructing the idea of truth. They are interested in
deconstructing the idea of God. They are interested in
deconstructing, for example, Edmund Burke or the Federalist Papers.
They are not interested in decon s tructing Martin Luther King.
They are not interested in deconstructing Marx. Those
deconstructions had to await the publica- tion of the Illiberal
Education. So relativism, we began to suspect, is not necessarily a
philosophy, but rather a tactical choice on the part of activists
who are using it to advance a new agenda. The activists that I am
speaking about are not relativists, they are absolutists, they are
Manichean. They believe that they are in possession of absolute
truth and that their enemies are n ot simply wrong, but immoral.
Their ene- mies are reactionaries; they are bigots. They want to
turn back the clock. They want to revive the hated regimes of
patriarchy and segregation, if not the Inquisition. And so, the
relativist strategy, I think, goes in three parts. The first, the
general prcject is aimed at centralizing previously marginal or
suspect forms of behavior or attitude. And the first strategy is to
gain tolerance-to say, for example, that the new lifestyles could
be accepted, that one's na t ural concerns about it could be
suppressed. The second stage is what I call neutrality, that one
should be essentially indifferent between the new model and the
old. One should state no preference for one over the other. And the
third, of course, is subsi d y. And so, by the time the gathering
storm-the agenda of the left, the political and moral
agenda-enshrines itself in three stages, at each stage it applies a
certain level of force, just enough to topple its reactionary
opposition. The new battleground, I think, is the very important
domains of race and gender, if you will. And in the area of race, I
think to a large degree what we are witnessing is the new
enthusiasm of a generation of disillusioned leftists-many of whom
have seen their utopian hope in a socialist regime collapse. It has
always been the project of Marxism in America to try to foment a
class di- vision in American society. But with the exception of a
brief period during and after the Depression, it has been quite
difficult in this country to set the Proletariat against the
Bourgeoisie in any systematic sense. Technically, I suppose, a
plumber would qualify as a member of the pro- letariat, and a clerk
would be a member of the Bourgeoisie, but there is really no
antagonism
22
between plu mbers and clerks in American society. If anything,
the clerk envies the plumber the amount of money he makes.. So,
given this frustrating absence of fear of class conflicts, I think
a lot of the old activists have discovered that it is much more
fertile, i t is much more -promising, particularly - with- the
-col- lapse of the Marxist ideal, for reinvesting these energies
into new categories based on divisions of race. And this, in fact,
is more fertile territory, because there is genuine racial
division, th e re is genuine racial anxiety in this country. I
think that a lot of the activists have discovered that it is very
profitable from the point of view of revising all of the
discredited Marxist categories to think of blacks as constituting a
kind of new, Ame r ican proletariat. This certainly governs a great
deal of the theoretical scholarship -that is, now. emerging in
the-American academy. The challenge for conservatives is a
difficult one, I think, because when values break down, it is hard
to put them back t ogether again. It is certainly not enough to
invoke the old-time religion. And the reason for that is that not
everybody accepts the authoritative edict of that religion. And one
of the reasons for the paralysis in the moral debate is that it
seems to be d ivided between two camps. On the one hand, there is a
kind of fundamentalist camp, which tends to identify its value with
authoritative text-Scripture, the Bible. On the other hand, you
have a group that rejects the authority of the Bible to speak
authori t atively on these questions. There really seems to be no
mediating structure between the authoritative fundamentalists and a
group that we can, with con- venience and accuracy, describe as the
secular humanists. So, I think our intellectual challenge is to try
to rediscover a rational ground for some of the moral dilemmas that
are faced in American society. That, perhaps in policy terms, will
help us to come up with a better framework for racial justice, and
a new understanding of the way in which men and w o men can relate
better to each other. I do think that the fact-that the radical
agenda is controversial, and the fact that family values, however
attenuated, have become an emotional part of this debate, does mean
that there is no de facto triumph on the p a rt of the left. At the
very least, we are still in the ball game. I think that perhaps one
may even say that the trend is going our way. Let us hope that with
some inheritance and some conviction some of these issues can be
re-engaged and better solutions developed.
* * 4%
David Horowitz: While we were winning the Cold War abroad, we seem
to have lost it here at home. I disagree with Mike Schwartz that
modem liberals have no tradition. Their tradition is the radical
tradition that goes back to Rousseau, whose views stand behind all
the totalitarian atroci- ties of this century. That doesn't mean
that everyone who calls himself a liberal is a totalitarian. As
James Burnham use d to say, the difference between Communists and
liberals is that the Com- munists know what they are doing. There
are a lot of liberals who have been confused and se- duced by the
radical arguments, and in the last two decades radicals have
overwhelmed the liberal culture. The good news, however, is that
radicalism is destined- to lose, because radicalism is a war
against nature. However, the bad news is that they can do wreak
enormous damage in the process of losing. How bad off we are was
just brought hom e to me in my own city of Los Angeles. We are en-
gaged there in a war with 100,000 armed gangsters in the South
Central district, who terrorize, first of all, the South Central
neighborhoods. Last April, they led a race riot against the Korean
community, which has not been reported at all accurately in the
press - since it was a black race riot against Koreans which
destroyed more than 800 Korean business@s simply because they were
Korean-owned.
23
In this war, the LAPD is incredibly understaffed. It is half the
per capita size of the police force of Philadelphia, although
geographically L.A. is much larger than Philadelphia. We have two
police per square mile. Nevertheless, last month the L.A. city
council voted seven to one that within eight years 44 p e rcent of
the police forcemust be female. This was a.complete capitu- lation
to feminist idiocy. Nobody would propose making the front line of
the L.A. Raiders 44 percent women. But there is other good news:
Although we are outnumbered in the culture, we c a n win battles.
We can even win them when the Democrats are in the majority, and we
should be preparing our- selves for just that prospect. About a
year and half ago I began a project, as I often do, by calling my
dear friend, Midge Decter for advice. I wa n ted to find out how
the Public Broadcasting System operated. We had had eleven years of
Republican presidents and the Reagan Revolution, and here was PBS,
acting as a propaganda machine for the Sandinistas and all of our
totalitarian adversaries. Midge su g gested I call Bob Kotlowitz,
who has been the head of programming at WNET for twenty years, whom
she had known at Harper's when he was a magazine editor. I asked
him how he attempted to balance the programming on the system. My
problem with public TV was t hat there was no conservative
presence; it was a video arm of the Democratic Party and the
Democratic Left. I believe that in any fair debate in our culture,
we will win hands down. The idea then was to get balance in public
television. I am not for remov i ng liberal viewpoints from PBS. I
have supported those who want to see a liberal Buckley show. "How
do you balance?" I asked Bob Kotlowitz. "Oh," he said, "That is a
good question. When I was an editor, I could open my magazine and
see the articles, or I c ould lay out the magazines for a year and
see what had been written. But with television you have to be
watching 24 hours a day to get an idea of what is being aired,
which no one can do." So, it occurred to me im- mediately that I
needed to obtain a list of programs that had been publicly funded
and that had been aired. I went to PBS and the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting to request the lists, but my request fell into
a black hole. So, I solicited the help of Senator Exon, a Democrat,
and im- mediate l y the system responded and I got a list. The
whole process took seven months. After that experience I realized
that the only way to get the system to respond was to go to
Congress. Along with Larry Jarvik of Heritage, I put together the
case on balance an d accountability in respect to public
television. We took our case to the Oversight Committee. Of course,
Republi- cans have known for years that in the Public Television
System they are dealing with a government-funded lobby against much
of what they stan d for, that weighs in every two or four or six
years against their candidacies in every state, district, and town
in this country. And so they were inclined to be sympathetic to our
case. Once the case had been prepared, once they had before them
the infor m ation that showed the extent of the bias, the lack of
fiscal and corporate accountability, seven of them held up the ap-
propriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting nine months
this year. At the end of that period the authorization was passed,
but with three new amendments. In the first one, Demo- cratic
Senator Robert Byrd, stipulated that if they were going to have
indecent programming it should be shown at hours when children are
asleep. The second stipulated that they would have to balance t he
programming as the law required and provide funds for alternative
programming when they did not. The third stipulated that they would
have to produce the list that I couldn't get. It had to be a list
that described every program, the funders, the conte nt, and so
forth, and it had to be published in every office in every station
across this country. It was a major victory. Of course the liberal
press reported it as a defeat for conservatives.
24
But now the issue that confronts us is: Where are the con servative
producers? Where on this panel considering the culture today, for
example, is an artist, a writer, a produper of culture? We are
talking about culture, and yet we lack the presence of those who
are culture workers. It is time. for us to rethink a nd retool for
the battles ahead. We have to get into a new mental frame. We have
to get out of our think tanks and engage in the culture. The only
way that we are going to win the battle for the culture is if we
stand for tolerance and for democratic valu e s. We can be
confident knowing that our values, because they don't run against
the natural order, are the ones that, in the long run, will
triumph. Finally, we have to be prepared to take back the culture
page by page, book by book, program by program, va lue by value
until the last bastion falls.
Michael Joyce: Let me give a little report from the heartland,
more specifically about two events that took place within the past
three weeks. Three weeks ago the children of Wisconsin re- turned
to public school, and we have had two interesting incidents in
these three weeks that I think go to the heart of some of the
things we have been talking about. The first event occurred in a
very affluent, suburban public school system. An elementary school
teacher complain e d to the union that she felt oppressed in her
classroom by the presence of the United States flag. The union
appealed immediately to the school board, which voted that from now
on this teacher was to be relieved from her oppression. The rule
would be that any teacher who wished to remove the American flag
would be free to do so with the sanction of the school board. This
is heartland, not South Central L.A. No mention was made of the
Pledge of Allegiance; we are just talking about the presence of the
flag i tself as a symbol. The second event occurred also in a very
affluent public school-this one was a high school- where on
returning to school, students were given a student responsibility
handbook. At first glance, one would have thought that the school's
a d ministration had taken seriously the task of holding children
responsible for their behavior. And in this handbook, even they
reflected Mike Schwartz's view that bad conduct should be punished.
But let me tell you what conduct was being proscribed in this
student responsibility handbook. First is the prohibition of
certain words, which are absolutely proscribed: girl, honey, doll,
babe, and hunk. And I would add, nothing was said about slut,
screwed, or wimp, but let's leave that aside. Second, behavior of a
certain kind is proscribed. One of my favorites was staring or
inappropri- ate looking at another person. The offense in so doing
is classified as "sexual harassment," a policy adopted by the local
school board in this predominantly white, affluent subu r b. And
finally, what might be called "nerd discrimination" crops up.
Subject to punishment under the "sexual harassment' 'rubric is
asking a person more than once for a date after being re- fused. So
much for nerds at the prom; they are out of luck. I rai s e this
because it was not so very long ago that public school was a
principal-maybe even the principal-agent for promoting a sense of
shared values, which at one time not so long ago seemed to hold
Americans together. Educators and citizens alike believed that a
society whose members lack common experience and a common body of
knowledge is a society without a fundamental culture, and that such
a society would tend to disintegrate into a mere aggregation of
individuals.
2 5
Thus it was that requiring stude nts to be exposed to a core
body of knowledge and to be famil- iar, at the very least, with
their common cultural heritage was the organizing principle and
even the reason for the existence of the public school. It was a
real submerging in tradition and h e ri- tage that made for a
common bond. As we know, certainly in the case of higher learning,
this pedagogy has been largely destroyed by that constellation of
attitudes, "political correctness," about which we have already
heard. This reality is now making significant inroads, quite
obviously, into pre-collegiate schools. State-owned schools cannot,
or will not, teach and insist on ethical standards that parents
want for their children. We hear over and over again from the Bill
Moyers of the world of the ne e d for higher ethical conduct, and
we know-that-children- adopt-many of their basic norms early in
life. Yet increasingly we are forcing children into schools which
cannot instruct children in the vir- tues and values of their
common tradition. The reason f or this is simple enough. Moral
instruction reflects particular moral stances, not simply things in
general, not mere fashion and fads. Today's chic seems to be
political correct- ness and all of its parts, which embraces the
view that value judgments hav e no cognitive content -a militant
toleration that suggests that we remain ethically agnostic with
respect to personal be- havior, but highly judgmental about certain
kinds of public content. It advocates laissez-faire personal
morality, enforced tolerance of different life styles, but a
puritanical political code regu- lating speech or pertinent
governmental behavior. The public schools, precisely because they
are supposed to represent an, and since politically correct
thinking insists on the toleration of all-except those who champion
traditional values- end up representing nobody except the
prevailing and desecrated secular assumptions and mo- tifs. Under
such assumptions these schools can allow "everybody's doing it"
sexual programs, for example, but the y dare not recite traditional
scruples against deviant sexual activity. Because American
educational policy encourages the growth of the state-owned
monopolies, the freedom to erect and sustain schools which reflect
profound values is being lost to all but the most affluent. James
Coleman has pointed out that throughout American history there have
been two conflict- ing orientations toward schools. The first one
understands the school as an institution releasing the child from
the blinders imposed by accide n t of birth in this or that family,
transcending the limitations of the family and taking the child
into the mainstream of American culture. The schools have been a
means for stripping away ethnic identity and social origin and
implanting a common, America n tradition. Now this orientation has
been the basis for public schools which now hold the view that the
producer of education knows better than the consumer. The second
orientation has been the basis for private schools. This view sees
the school as an ex t ension of the family, reinforcing the
family's values as they are found in the family. The school is seen
as a proficient means for transmitting and sustaining the culture
of the family com- munity from one generation to the next. Now, the
tension between these two differing views is at the heart of the
debate in regard to school choice. So, this suggests to me some
policy questions that we need to grope with, having to do with this
matter of seeing to it that accountability for values is exacted
from the s chool sys- tem. A question, I suppose, is, "Do the
producers of school education still know better than the parent
consumers?" Do we still trust professional educrats with the power
to educate children, or do we trust parents to make decisions about
the k ind of education they want for their children?
2 6
Now, I am happy to report a little good news, also from the
heartland. Our foundation, to- gether with some businesses,
arranged to award scholarships to children who live in the city of
Nfilwaukee who me et a needs test. To pass the needs test, families
have to qualify for the school .lunch program, so we are t@lking
about kids who are demonstrably poor. This scholarship pro- gram
allows parents to choose among the 92 non-public schools in that
city. We h a d no idea when we announced this on June 10th the sort
of response there would be, but I am happy to re- port that as of
this moment, we have 3,000 youngsters benefitting, grades
kindergarten through eight, and many more in the pipeline. While I
can't gua r antee the quality of the schools that have been chosen,
I think I can guaran- tee that the parents -feel--a new -sense of
accountability, and that they will demand much more from the school
than the aforementioned school boards that allowed the rigid proh
ibition of speech and conduct, and the removal of the American
flag.
E lizabeth Wright: As important as this subject of values is for
every American, there could not be a more urgent one facing blacks
today. Along with the ongoing crises that shout at us fro m our
daily newspapers are the intangible forces that have destroyed the
confidence and trust that we blacks once had in one another, the
sense of obligation to be a credit to the group. These are all
characteristics that once were possessed in abundance b y a by-gone
era of blacks who were proudly committed to what was commonly
called the progress of the race. Such qualities were supported and
nurtured by an outstanding group of people who did not run around
calling them- selves leaders, but through their a ctions and
behavior proved to be indispensable teachers and guides. The spring
edition of my newsletter, Issues and Views, celebrates some of
these people, beginning with the giant of them all, Booker T.
Washington. We are here today asking whether it is p ossible to
turn this mess around and restore standards and values that were
once taken for granted. I think before a real movement for such a
restora- tion is feasible, a great many people must not only become
aware-and this is in terms of all of us-but m u st become
indignantly aware of just how bad things are. For blacks
specifically, this means not only facing up to what is going on in
the larger society, but in addition, confronting the ugly truths as
to just who and what is at the core of what keeps seg m ents of our
community paralyzed and unable to move forward. Although I find it
hard to be optimistic, I am gratified by the growing frequency of
letters and phone calls I receive from blacks in all parts of the
country, who in their first, excited stages o f awakening have just
learned about the newsletter and feel compelled to call and share
their new enlightenment, or just touch base with someone they feel
is a kindredsoul. It is always interest- ing to hear of their
particular journey from blind obedienc e to the teachings of the
black establishment through the morass of intimidating propaganda
until that light bulb goes off and they find themselves, often
initially against their will, at the place where they can openly
ac- knowledge not just the folly of s ocial policies that have done
great harm, but also the injury done to blacks by a self-interested
black middle-class whose members figured out long ago how to seize
the opportunity to use the troubles of the race to advance their
careers and enrich them- selves. So, the question is, is there any
chance of restoring the old values that once supported and sus-
tained us during the worst of times? Is it conceivable that we
might find our way back from the precipice?
27
I want to tell you about a man and a g roup of blacks who not only
believe that it is possible, but are determined to play an active
role in bringing it about. Their story is the lead feature of the
latest edition of Issues and Views, the summer edition, which I
hope is rolling off the press r ight
now. It all started when I received a note and a newspaper clipping
from a Texas subscriber to Issues and Views. The article was about
a black preacher in Mississippi who had guided his congrega- tion
as they weaned themselves off welfare and food stamps b y
establishing small businesses and becoming farmers. I called the
church office in Mississippi and then sent copies of the newsletter
to the Reverend Luke Edwards. As it turned out, he was delighted
with the message of the newsletter and photo- copied a l ot of the
articles, which he began sending everywhere. He was delighted when
I told him that I wanted to visit and learn about what he was
doing. When I got down there I found a very outspoken pastor
determined to preach, the message of economic independe n ce and
determined to show by example how blacks can get free and stay free
of government benevolence. It was in the late 1970s when he
discovered that 95 percent of his congregation, which is about 200
members, lived on welfare, food stamps, and other for m s of
assistance. So he got them to agree as a group to use those
resources in such a manner that they would never have to use them
again. Together they incorporated REACH, Inc., which stands for
Research, Education And Community Hope, and set out to do wh a t he
proposed. EleanorWalker, who manages the REACH office, explained to
me what they did. She told me: "We went to the wholesale company
and bought groceries and opened a little grocery at the church.
Each week all the members bought their food there, an d after a
while we had a surplus of money. We decided to open a real grocery
store, so we could also sell to the public. We put a down payment
on a supermarket, and that is how REACH really got its beginning."
Within a year they had purchased a second supe r market and then
turned a former liquor store that was next door to it into a
chicken fast food restaurant. By now, all REACH members were off
welfare and food stamps and were sharing in the responsibilities of
running these enterprises. Walker told me tha t it was at this
point that they realized they could accomplish anything as long as
they worked together and put the community first by re-investing
their profits. She said, "These were great achievements for us. And
after we saw what we had done, nothing w as im- possible-I mean
nothing."' The members of REACH now own about 2,000 acres of
farmland, spread out in places like Epps, Alabama, and Decatur,
Mississippi, where they grow crops that are sold on the wholesale
market, and which they also process for r e tail selling. From
their farms they stock much of the produce in their stores and
provide the meats and vegetables required by their restaurants.
They own a spacious, comfortable restaurant that I ate in, called
South Fork, in Utah, Alabama; two separate d elis in Livingston and
York, Alabama; a gas station in Livingston; and a meat process- ing
plant in Meridian. The pride and joy of the REACH community is
their school, the Christ Temple Academy, which has nursery and
Kindergarten through 12th grade. The s c hool and its dormitories
are lo- cated in Emelle, Alabama, where the fellowship is actually
centered and where Reverend Edwards lives. This school is really
the community's urgent mission, and they are constantly ex- panding
it and building new dormitorie s.
28
Along with the children of REACH members, the community also cares
for children referred by agencies or courts as problem cases or as
abandoned children. They refuse to take anypublic funding for these
children, and the community bears the entire c ost for their
upkeep. The school curriculum is the Accelerated Christian
Education curriculum. The instructors are all members of the
community, and are trained at the campus of ACE in Lewisville,
Texas. Out- side teachers are also brought in to assist wi t h
special subjects, like mathematics. The school director told me,
"We are committed, not only to giving our children the best
education possible, but to educating them with a deep sense of
religious belief and moral values." Luke Edwards has some especia l
ly succinct reflections on those who have misled blacks away from
what he believes are the values of our tradition and away from the
earlier emphasis on eco- nomics. He is especially outraged that the
black masses, once freed from their former servitude, n ow find
themselves captives of another form of slavery, promoted mainly by
other blacks. He says, "Welfare has made invalids out of us. After
the Civil Rights Movement there was enough money given to all these
counties in Alabama and Mississippi and throu g hout the South to
re- lease black people from poverty, if that money had been applied
correctly. Instead, blacks used their own people to undermine such
efforts, and they are still doing it today." And he is severe when
assessing the work of black politic i ans and described to me his
futile at- tempts to have positive contacts with legislators in his
region. He says, "What bothers me most about these politicians is
that they use the grass roots black to get political clout for
themselves. We were taken in b y the black politician in the first
place. They claimed that we needed black representation, and even
though none of them had any track records, we voted them in. Now
that they are in, they just continue to attack and don't even know
what they are in offic e for. They are only there because they are
black." He is angry that none of these politicians have turned
their efforts to eliminating particular gov- emment regulations
that he feels are especially harmful and burdensome to small
business owners, and whi c h have affected a lot of the work that
REACH has tried to do. He says, "In place of doing research and
finding out what we really need, these politicians just keep
playing the old attack game. They should be working to clear up
some of those laws that hur t us, all of these regulations on our
backs. They talk a good game, but they never do anything." The
local black gentry who make up the NAACP chapter, as you can
surmise, are somewhat piqued by Luke Edwards's outspokenness. But
it is not really his words s o much that bothers them. It is more
likely that they are threatened by the enormous success of the
group's hard work. I saw with my own eyes that these people,
indeed, work from before sun-up to sun-down, and it is paying off.
So, who else would be their g reatest antagonists? Last year an
Atlanta television crew spent days taping the community's
activities and inter- viewing its members. When the program aired,
the film was spliced so that questions originally asked to REACH
members on their farms were now answered by local NAACP officials,
who took the opportunity to disparage the organization as a commune
of Moonies. The producer had obviously played the old friendly,
schmoozing game-the "we are on your side!--to get the filming done,
before zapping them w ith the cleverly edited tape. Nuisance
telephone calls are made regularly to local commissioners to alert
them to supposed health or fire violations on REACH properties.
Such harassment keeps inspectors busy making trips out to the
farms, only to leave af ter flnding nothing amiss and wondering why
they were sent in the first place.
29
Edwards laughs at the charges of heading a commune and says, "This
is nothing of the sort. If we're modeled after anything, it is the
Israeli kibbutz. Like the kibbutz, we are a co-operative, and we
are working together to achieve common goals. In fact, some Jewish
reporters have been down here and they recognized it immediately."
By the way, there have been two favorable media portrayals of the
organization. One was on CNN ; it was a five-minute piece. Ile
other was a 30-minute piece on Alabama Public Television. Just like
his spiritual mentor, Booker T. Washington, Edwards proclaims the
liberating value of work. He says, "Our concept is that we invest
our profits back, so w e can help ourselves. We make short-term
sacrifices for long-term benefits. We don't waste anything and we
continue to build together." He believes he understands the root of
the opposition of local black leaders and says, "Groups like the
NAACP have to fi g ht, because if they don't, they are going to be
shown up. By under- standing black history, we know what to expect
from such people, so we are not surprised. We don't like that it is
this way; but they are not going to stop us." He might have added
that t h e idea of the poor rejecting white benevolence is a
fearful prospect for these notables whose ca- reers are tied to
their people's dependency status. Dissident blacks, and poor ones
at that, could begin to give whites the impression that blacks are
as cap a ble as others of using the mechanisms of capitalism to
uplift themselves. For the civil rights groups, it is imperative
that such heretics be characterized as Uncle Toms or out-of-touch
conservatives. What must be maintained at all cost is the fiction
of b lack helplessness in the midst of rampant racism. In my
newsletter piece, Edwards demonstrates how he handles rejection by
the local white farmer's association, which is an important
middleman in the selling of cattle. Like innovative blacks of an
earlier era, before we were taught as a matter of course to whine
or throw tantrums or march on Washington or head for the courts
when confronted with white rejection, Edwards wound up turning an
insult into an advantage for the community. My article also describ
e s how they handled some dirty pool tactics of a fast food chain
compet- itor by working to make their South Fork restaurant a
popular eatery. Edwards said, "If you set out to do it right,
everybody will come and buy from you. This is my idea of integratio
n , not what the black leaders teach. And when you become a
producer you are not only in demand, you are respected." As far as
he is concerned, the economic system is color blind. He says, "If
we come together and pool our resources, just like the Indians a n
d Arabs who are now coming to this country and buying up property
and land all over the South, the system will work for us, as it
works for 92 them. In referring to the white farmers who are his
neighbors in the region, he says, "The playing field is leve l
between us because we made it level. Nobody did it for us. If you
don't let me into what you build, I am not going to argue with you;
I will go build something of my own and oper- ate. it. These
leaders are always preaching about being equal. Why limit y o
urself to equality when you can go as far as your talent will take
you? I teach my people not to settle for just being 99 equal. I
will just wrap up by saying that Edwards would like to see REACH
become a model for sim- ilar communities of blacks. He sees no hope
if blacks do not learn to trust one another again. He believes that
since his fellowship of people have learned to do this, then there
is plenty of hope. I hope he is right.
30
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